Preferred Citation note

Biographical/Historical note

Jay Fox, trade unionist, syndicalist, communist and anarchist, lived more than fifty years in the small farming community of Home, Washington on Puget Sound. Fox, born in 1870, took part in the Haymarket riot while still in his teens. After an active career as a union organizer, which brought him to the Pacific Northwest, he joined the anarchist Mutual Home Colony Association, usually know as the Home Colony. For an interesting view of the life and activities at the colony see Stewart Holbrook's
Anarchists at Home (American Scholar, 15 (Autumn 1946) 425-438). For a more thorough account of colony's experiences, and a brief biography of Jay Fox, see Charles P. LeWarne's chapter on the Home Colony in his
Communitarian Experiments in Western Washington, 1885-1915 (Unpublished dissertation, University of Washington, 1969).

At Home, Fox served as editor of
The Agitator, the colony newspaper, a successor to those previously suppressed by the U.S. Post Office. During this period his editorial defense of colonists who were arrested for nude bathing brought him into the public eye when he was prosecuted for "encouraging or advocating disrespect for the law." Although an isolated rural area, Home had considerable contact with scores of radical political and social thinkers, including Emma Goldman, James F. Morton, Elbert Hubbard and Fox's old friend from union organizing days, William Z. Foster. His death, in 1961, was within months of Fosters.

Scope and Contents note

The papers consist of correspondence, drafts, notes, membership cards and certificates, newspaper clippings, broadsides and pamphlets by or about Fox. His manuscript autobiography entitled
Syndicalism: its growth and decay described by Terry Pettus (
Sixty-four years a union man. Our World, a weekly publication of The Daily People's World (February 16, 1951) 4-7), is not among these papers and no other record of it has been found. Some of the books, pamphlets and newspapers acquired by the WSU Library from Douglas Owens may have once been a part of the Home Colony Library, but only the one indicated here has any notation of ownership.

Personal Name(s)

Subject(s)

Bibliography

The activities of Theodore Schroeder and the Free Speech League, predecessor to the American Civil Liberties Union, in Fox's behalf are documented in the Schroeder Papers at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (NUCMC 71-1877).

Organizer certificates from the American Federation of Labor, signed by Samuel Gompers. 1914 1915 1917 3.0 items.

7

The nude and the prudes by J. F.[Clipping from Home Agitator, which lead to Fox's arrest] 1910 1.0 item, tearsheet.

8

Letters to Jack Lumber [a series of editorial articles by Fox in The Timberworker, some with annotations and corrections]. 1914 approx. 30 items, clippings.

9

Letter, Jay Fox, to the Editor of the [Tacoma?] Ledger: "The problem of the surplus, May 26, 1932. 1.0 item, clipping.

10

History of the Eight-Hour Day by Jay Fox, Chicago Labor News September 15, 1916 1.0 item, clipping.

11

I was at Haymarket by Jay Fox, Our World [supplement to People's World] April 27, 1951 1.0 item, clipping.

12

Miscellaneous papers. Includes carbon of a letter to the Circulation Manager of the Tacoma News Tribune, undated; bank statement, December 1929; blank letterheads of The Plumb Plan League and The International Trade Union League, undated. 1914-1929 7.0 items.